Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

I love USTA playoffs. The stressful, high stakes weekend (punctuated by the captain gripping with one hand her bullhorn, in the other her clipboard, and with her teeth her whistle) is the best, most efficient way to learn whether you absolutely love playing with a certain teammate or hate playing with a certain teammate and I AM NOT COMING BACK IF SHE IS STILL ON THE TEAM, CAPTAIN, SO YOU NEED TO MAKE A CHOICE RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, IT’S EITHER HER OR ME YOU HEAR ME.

Ahem.

Love the playoffs.

For the first time in my captaining career, I had a USTA team finish first in its regular season flight. Make that two teams. That’s right, dear reader! Both my 4.0 (yes, the one I don’t play for but practice the most with) and my 4.5 (the one I do play for and quite a bit because I am terrible at recruiting) teams won their respective regular season flights this past fall season. HECK YEAH.

AND THEN my 4.5 team won their one-match-winner-take-all-playoff showdown (as opposed to the usual attrition-filled, multiple matches over the course of 24 hours fare) to become the champions of the fall season. WHAT UP!!!!

I, for one, can play tennis for hours!!!! Let’s test this theory out, Chriiiissssttttyyyy!!!!

(Someone made a most stupendous point about weekend tennis tournaments: if your tennis team is in a flight of 4 and the format is round robin and you play every guaranteed match – generally spanning Friday night through Saturday early afternoon – you’re basically playing 3 matches in 24 hours. WHO SIGNED OFF ON THIS????)

((In case anyone of Dallas Tennis Association authority is reading this [as opposed to my actually emailing them directly], I would have preferred at least 3 matches worth of 4.5 playoffs even if it was against the same team so I could have played everyone on my team. While I think the playoff tournament format is odd given the clientele in particular, if we’re already gonna have a tennis-filled weekend, the more guaranteed matches the better, so says the playing-time-juggling, player-appeasing captain part of me.))

The high from winning playoffs lasted all of five minutes, however. We didn’t receive our Area/Cities Championship scarves till the following week when I handed them out individually out of the trunk of Blueberry, my car (much like dated reference Master P did when he innovatively used a guerrilla-style marketing campaign of selling his rap tapes out of his car’s behind directly to possibly interested neighborhoods in order to better build up word-of-mouth buzz), so I sadly do not have a team photo of everyone together donning their cute navy and white scarves with one knee turned, hands on hips, and boobs out that would have clearly screamed RECREATIONAL ADULT TENNIS BADACES RIGHT HERE.

Sadness.

I don’t have time to break down all the differences between fall and spring USTA for anyone not from Dallas (or explain that it’s all the same 2016 league year…even though the 2016 fall league was played during the 2015 calendar year which means fall tennis affects year-end ratings which means tanking happens…), but basically, winning fall playoffs means that my 4.5 team is guaranteed a spot in this upcoming spring season’s Qualifying Tournament.

What is the Qualifying Tournament (or the wildcard round to make a professional sports analogy or Mini’s as it was known at some point before I was born winky face) you might be asking? It’s technically playoffs, and playoffs is the reason why I play USTA. So all you have to know is that one of my USTA teams is already in the spring playoffs and I won’t have to toss and turn over my lineup decisions this spring until the playoff weekends. Because lineup decisions are the worst. I spend the days leading up to team matches questioning my proposed lineup, and I can give you tens of reasons why my lineup that week will fail. And then it rather unexpectedly doesn’t. And then I do that thing where I blink confusingly all around me for a few seconds upon hearing the news of my team’s victory before screaming euphorically and strutting about the tennis courts and taking full credit for being a recreational adult team tennis captaining genius. Because I am. I totally am. Totally knew we were gonna win all five lines the whole time. Totally.

(This mindset is waaaaayyyyyyy better than being blindsided by the news of your team losing its team match by a line and being utterly devastated. And then being the last person to leave the tennis facility by a good hour as you lie atop a park table and stare up at the clouds while looping through the five stages of grief.)

Now I didn’t tell my teams this ahead of time because somehow I didn’t think this would make for a great pre-playoff pep talk, but the real reason why I’m super excited about one of my teams winning Fall Cities is that I now can do whatever I want with the lineup and I can play anyone and everyone…at singles!!! I mean…how do you know you don’t like something if you haven’t been forced to do it…recently? 😉

Aside from being a control freak and a know-it-all, I might also captain a recreational adult tennis team because, um, there’s a bit of a, let’s call it, mischievous streak in me that likes to, uh, push people’s buttons. And then people leave my teams for some reason and I just simply have no idea why. 😀

But the job of a captain never ends. Just as Nick Saban is no doubt worrying about his recruiting class as he did the last time his Alabama team won the National Championships, I’ve been stressing over my own batch of recruits in addition to worrying about who’s returning. Because someone for sure is leaving. Someone always leaves. Probably more than one person.

(Did I ever tell you about the time when I seriously thought I wouldn’t be able to field a team because there had been a mass exodus during the off-season? [Yes, yes, I am delightful.] And then three seasons later, the latest version of the team wins Fall Cities. Can’t wait to experience the next flip side in three more seasons…)

Which is fine. Totally fine for people to leave. (It works both ways.) If you could just please send me a sweet email that you’re leaving to play with your friends but you, Christy, have been a swell captain and I’ll always remember the time when you (insert funny thing here) and best of luck to your team and I’ll see you on the tennis courts, that would be super. Preferably send this email before I send you the usual pre-season team contract full of daydreams and innocence and dates and rules and lots and lots of exclamation points.

Alas. Most people don’t tell you they’re leaving till you reach out to them first. Or until you see that they signed up for another team. (I wouldn’t wish that punch-to-the-gut feeling on my worst enemy.) And so I haven’t. I have not sent out a single email about next season in order to hold off the rejection letters that will no doubt come in response from both those who aren’t returning and those who said they’d come play and now won’t (probably because they haven’t heard from me and a) think I’m not captaining a team, b) think I don’t want them after all and did that adult thing where I just stopped talking to them, or c) got wooed away by the last captain to talk to them. I can’t tell you just how weary I am of 40 and Over Captains as the 40 and Over USTA league is going on right now in my area and I, perhaps foolishly, chose to not be a part of that windy, wintery mush).

This will have to do as my Fall Cities winning team photo.  Hiya, Beautifuls. 😀

The team you believe you’ll be fielding during the off-season and have such high aspirations for and put all your hopes into is never the team that actually signs up. Also, season-ending injuries. There has always been at least one player on my teams who suffers a season-ending injury. Every. Single. Season. Who-oh-who will it be come May…

Remember when this post started off with the announcement of my two teams’ fall season achievements? Huh. 😉

Random stuff:

• I would highly recommend the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. The growth mindset (as opposed to a fixed mindset) way of looking at the world will change the way you parent and perhaps how you view your own capabilities.
• I love me some Jack In The Box tacos and have eaten them nearly every day this month. Thank you so much to April and my 4.5 team for my Jack In The Box captain’s gift card!!!!! Awwwwww, you guuuuuyyyyyssss…how did you know?! 🙂